Visitors to the Sun newspaper chain of websites and the Canoe.ca news portal over the past week were greeted with the company’s usual photo grid of stories tagged with colourful vertical rectangles right on the photo—Miley Cyrus costumes (Halloween), Mike Duffy surrounded by microphones (Politics) and local hockey team reports (Sports). But there was something curious hovering just above the fold: a photo of a smiling doctor labelled by a green rectangle with the words “Medijean.”
Clicking it led readers to a site for touting something called “The Medical Marijuana Debates.” That it appeared as editorial under a Canoe.ca banner with no discernible ties to third-party ownership, visitors could be forgiven for assuming Sun Media had waded into CBC or New York Times territory of public engagement under the tutelage of academics and high-ranking topic experts.
The “native advertiser” behind the initiative is a Vancouver-based pharmaceutical marijuana company called Medijean. The 18-month-old company launched a month-long online national debate on medical marijuana asking Canadians coast-to-coast to follow along and participate.
“As a leader in this new, emerging and potentially massive industry, we felt it was important to host a national debate in order to raise awareness around medical marijuana,” said Anton Mattadeen, chief strategy officer at MediJean, who is based in Toronto.
The Medical Marijuana Debates are organized into one topic per week, focusing on patients, doctors, law enforcement personnel and politicians. The end goal for the company is to gain the trust and brand recognition of consumers authorized to buy medicinal marijuana by highlighting the benefits of their pharmaceutically pure product, while having professional opinions warn against buying street-grade alternatives. The debates also target doctors and the ignorance and fear that’s prevalent in the medical industry about medicinal marijuana.
Once Mattadeen made the decision to own the education and public input around the nascent industry, going to an ad or PR agency was the last thing on his mind.
“Our messaging was anti-agency. We didn’t want the message co-opted by agency speak. The baseline stakeholder in this is a patient that is suffering with some type of ailment. You have to provide them with basic information and remind other stakeholders that this is what you’re trying to do,” he said.
So Mattadeen went to Newsrooms, a “network dedicated to providing continuous content marketing and social media coverage for brands.” Newsrooms recommended that the best way to disseminate the debate content and solicit public involvement was to piggyback on a traditional media company’s distribution, in this case, Quebecor. “It was an opportune way for a media company to generate revenue, so they became interested,” said co-founder Chris Hogg. “We were able to promote the events at scale nationally.”
The promotion is currently running in the Toronto Sun, Ottawa Sun, Calgary Sun, Edmonton Sun, Winnipeg Sun, London Free Press, Journal de Montreal and Journal de Quebec. MediJean and independent journalists at The Medical Marijuana Review will publish articles and research on their respective websites.
Newsrooms, fond of calling itself “the CNN for brands,” built a team of 20 journalists and topic experts from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Israel, South America and the Czech Republic to participate and moderate the events. The team was assembled in a couple of weeks and tasked with reporting on, listening to and socially amplifying the chatter on behalf of Medijean.
“There is an incredible amount of stigmatization out there,” said Hogg of medicinal marijuana. “This is a sustained, frequent way to engage the Canadian public in a transparent way. It’s an incredible brand-builder for Medijean in a brand new, very untapped industry.” He says that his newsroom team continually listens, engages with and polls the public. “We have polls at 4:20 about what was discussed that day. We make it fun.”
The incredible volume of content, said Mattadeen, will be used as market research to position the brand as it prepares to receive its Approved Licensed Producer from Health Canada in the coming months.
“This enables us to dig deep. What’s resonating with Canadians? Why would there be reluctance among medical community?”
If only a :30 would do such double-duty.
